shop at this hour of the day--there's more welcome matters at hand."

He put his snuff box and his gaudy handkerchief out of sight, and
looked at his host and hostess with another knowing glance, reminding
me somehow of a wicked old condor which I had sometimes seen at the
Zoological Gardens, eyeing the keeper who approached with its meal.

"Mr. Cazalette," remarked Miss Raven, with an informing glance at me,
"never, on principle, touches bite or sup between breakfast and
dinner--and he has no great love of breakfast."

"I'm a disciple of the justly famed and great man, Abernethy,"
observed Mr. Cazalette. "I'd never have lived to my age nor kept my
energy at what, thank Heaven, it is, if I hadn't been. D'ye know how
old I am, Middlebrook?"

"I really don't, Mr. Cazalette," I replied.

"Well I'm eighty years of age," he answered with a grin. "And I'm
intending to be a hundred! And on my hundredth birthday, I'll give a
party, and I'll dance with the sprightliest lassie that's there, and
if I'm not as lively as she is I'll be sore out of my calculations."

"A truly wonderful young man!" exclaimed Mr. Raven. "I veritably
believe he feels--and is--younger than myself--and I'm twenty years
his junior."

So I had now discovered certain facts about Mr. Cazalette. He was an
octogenarian. He was uncannily active. He had an almost imp-like
desire to live--and to dance when he ought to have been wrapped in
blankets and saying his last prayers. And a few minutes later, when we
were seated round our host's table, I discovered another fact--Mr.
Cazalette was one of those men to whom dinner is the event of the day,
and who regard conversation--on their own part, at any rate--as a
wicked disturbance of sacred rites. As the meal progressed (and Mr.
Raven's cook proved to be an unusually clever and good one) I was
astonished at Mr. Cazalette's gastronomic powers and at his love of
mad dishes: indeed, I never saw a man eat so much, nor with such
hearty appreciation of his food, nor in such a concentrated silence.
Nevertheless, that he kept his ears wide open to what was being said
around him, I soon discovered. I was telling Mr. Raven and his niece
of my adventure of the afternoon, and suddenly I observed that Mr.
Cazalette, on the other side of the round table at which we sat, had
stopped eating, and that, knife and fork still in his queer, claw-like
hands, he was peering at me under the shaded lamps, his black, burning
eyes full